Departments

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surveillance

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    4/3/2023

    The Beneficiary of Hosting the Olympics is the Police State

    by Jules Boykoff

    The extreme circumstances surrounding the international spectacle of the games justifies "states of exception" that remain part of law enforcement practices after the games end, stifling civil liberties and democratic dissent. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    11/14/2022

    Beverly Gage on J. Edgar Hoover—Enemy of Democracy

    Beverly Gage's book explains the FBI director's longevity not to dark arts of blackmail and secret-keeping, but to a more straightforward and disturbing explanation: many Americans shared Hoover's reactionary views and liked how he cracked down on dissenters. 

  • SOURCE: Wired
    11/1/2022

    Are Americans Ready for their Neighbors to Turn Them In?

    From abortion to classroom teaching, state laws are increasingly incentivizing people to report other members of the community for violating new restrictions. Experts say this has worked in the past to erode trust and enable further authoritarianism. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    8/4/2022

    The Coming Pregnancy Surveillance State Will Bring "Homeland Security" to Women's Bodies

    by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

    The Dobbs ruling puts longstanding racist and nationalist beliefs that white women's reproductive labor is the price of their citizenship, and punitive controls on women of color, on collision course with the modern capacity of digital surveillance, threatening the criminalization of any miscarried pregnancy. 

  • SOURCE: Wired
    6/27/2022

    Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like a Sex Worker?

    by Olivia Snow

    A moral panic over sex trafficking has justified the development of an extensive electronic infrastructure of surveillance and punishment of sex workers. These are the tools other women can expect to have used against them if they seek (or seek to learn about) abortions or associate online with others who do.

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    4/21/2022

    How the Public Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Wiretapping

    by Andrew Lanham

    Brian Hochman shows that the white backlash to civil rights and racial justice protests helped to undermine longstanding civil libertarian opposition to electronic surveillance and normalize the idea of the government spying on Americans. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    1/30/2022

    The Islamophobia of Domestic Security and the Capitol Insurrection

    by Juan Cole

    Perhaps if the FBI hadn't been spending the last 20 years spying on American Muslims the organizing of white Christian nationalists leading to to the January 6 assault on the Capitol would't have been an apparent surprise to the authorities. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    11/30/2021

    Facial Surveillance Has Always Been Flawed

    by Amanda Levendowski

    Today, artificial intelligence startups are scraping the web to build massive face-recognition databases, without any pretense of consent by the public. The technology may be new, but the intrusive assertion of surveillance has a long history. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    8/18/2021

    Prison Tech Comes Home: Tenants and Residents in the Surveillance State

    by Erin McElroy, Meredith Whittaker and Nicole E. Weber

    Landlords have combined technologies developed for screening tenants in the 1970s with more recent digital surveillance and facial recognition systems developed in prisons to dramatically increase control over their tenants during an affordable housing crisis. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    2/21/2021

    What the FBI Had on Grandpa

    by Molly Jong-Fast

    "I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J. Edgar Hoover disagreed." The FBI surveilled writer Howard Fast extensively, though, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life."

  • SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
    9/14/2020

    The Dark Side of Campus Efforts to Stop COVID-19

    by Grace Watkins

    While colleges have a legitimate interest in suppressing virus transmission on campus, it is dangerous to expand the surveillance powers of campus police. 

  • SOURCE: MIT Technology Review
    6/3/2020

    Why Filming Police Violence Has Done Nothing to Stop It

    The evidence suggests body cameras and other technological solutions to police violence are inadequate because the police are protected against consequences even if their misdeeds are recorded.